


Underworld

by waxjism



Category: Backstreet Boys, NSYNC
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dystopia, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-06-12
Updated: 2001-06-11
Packaged: 2017-10-06 09:18:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 19
Words: 20,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/52095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waxjism/pseuds/waxjism





	1. Bone

You run.

They're not far behind, but the sound of their footsteps is lost in the maze of tunnels.

They have dogs.

You duck into a smaller tunnel, you have to run in a crouch here, because you're a tall boy. You and Chris put pepper here last week and if you're lucky, some of it is still strong enough on the slick, damp floor to confuse the dogs.

Sharp left turn into another bigger tunnel and you almost slip, but you catch the helpful hook of rusty steel that pokes out of the wall right at the turn. You've been running ever since they spotted you, Upground, right outside Morrix Digs. You haven't been Upground much, but you've all got the quickest routes back down memorised. You made it. They followed, of course, but it hardly ever happens that they catch anyone down here.

Hardly ever, famous last words, and you have time to finish that thought before you stumble on something and go sprawling on your face in the half-inch of stagnant water that covers the bottom of the tunnel.

You fall hard and you know how to fall but sometimes even training isn't enough. You feel your knee twist and something tears and cracks in your foot. Your forehead smacks into the rough concrete of the wall. You clap your hands over your mouth to muffle the scream.

You can handle pain. It's just a question of riding the wave and not think about what's broken and is it permanent and will the dogs find you and will someone from below find you first and if they take you, will Chris ever know what happened. Don't think about that, just lie here frozen as the stinking water seeps through your clothes.

The pain dies down from a scream to a dull roar, and you relax one muscle after another and try to move. You think your kneecap is dislocated. That's not too bad. You think something is broken in your leg. That's very bad. You hope it's the splint bone rather than the shinbone, because you can still walk with a broken splint bone. You move your foot and hiss and admit that it's not the splint bone but something worse, something in the foot. You don't think you'll be able to walk.

The pain is making your head swim, and you want to cry, but you can't, they'll find you and you can't cry when they can burst in here any minute. That's a rule you've made for yourself. If they ever catch you, they won't catch you crying.

You can hear the dogs now.


	2. Meat

Fucking hell, but he's sick of the food. The food is the worst part about this gig. The sewer system is his kingdom, and he loves it here, but the food sucks.

"Tell me again why we don't have a McDonald's down here," he says.

"The rats prefer Burger King," Joey says. He's feeding Baby. She gurgles and bats at the spoon.

"Your kid hates it, too," Chris says.

"She's eating it, isn't she?" Joey says. There's a touch of pride in his voice, like the kid just spelled 'incongruity' or something, rather than just swallowed the vile mush of overboiled cabbage and grey, stringy meat.

After the whole thing with the baby, it seems like Joey's suddenly older than Chris. Responsible father and provider. Enough to make a guy sick, Chris thinks. "You seen Justin?" he asks, because Justin's still a fun guy.

"Not since he went up Upground. Maybe he's trying to get your lazy ass a burger."

Chris pushes the plate aside. He's not really that hungry. "I bet he's getting a burger for himself."

"If he does, he'll get you one, too," Joey says, cleaning Baby's face gently. "He'd wipe your ass for you after you take a dump if you'd let him."

"He would not," Chris says. Joey looks up and grins at him, a good old Joey-grin, hello, nice to see you back, you old hoser.

"He would. Kid's in love with you. He'd do anything."

"Yeah, well, whatever," Chris says. This conversation is making him antsy. It's getting late, and he's always nervous when Justin goes Upground. That's where he came from, and maybe one day he'll just go back. He gave up a lot.

Joey's bouncing Baby on his knee. "Mah Baby don't love no one ... but meeee," he sings, and she laughs toothlessly.

"Why don't you give her a proper name, man?" Chris asks.

"We called her Baby," Joey says stubbornly.

"When she was a fetus. You didn't know if it was a boy or a girl."

"We called her Baby," Joey repeats and gets up. "I'm gonna go check the pumps."

*

JC is sitting in the corridor outside.

"What are you doing?" Chris asks.

"Nothing," JC says.

"Seen Justin?"

"Not since this morning."

"Are you really doing nothing?" Chris asks. He can't imagine doing nothing.

"Yup."

"Okay. Well, knock yourself out."

JC gives him a tense little smile and goes back to doing nothing. Weirdo, Chris thinks, but he feels bad about that. JC isn't made for life down here. He's been here for as long as Chris has, five years, and he's a hothouse flower wilting in a dark closet. Justin has been here three months, and he's turned out to be a born sewer rat. Some people just have it, and JC isn't one of them.

*

A voice calls out to him, bouncing off the tunnel walls. "Kirkpatrick!"

He straightens up and tries to look sharp. "Sir."

Alex saunters up to him. Alex always saunters. It's fucking scary. "Are you missing anyone?" he says, and Chris' insides turn cold.

"Yes, sir," he says, but he can hardly hear his own voice. "Justin."

"Okay, consider him lost. We had patrols in the Eastern grid an hour ago, and the lookouts said they carried someone out."

"Carried? Sir?"

"He was incapacitated." Alex is already turning away, but Chris reaches out and grabs his sleeve. Alex looks down at his hand. Chris lets him go.

"Where would they take him, sir?"

Alex studies him for a while with eyes that are black in the murky tunnel. Chris knows they're green, though. "Justin? Isn't that the kid who just followed you home one day? Tall boy, hair like a sheepskin?"

"Yes."

"A little soft on him, huh?" Alex smiles, but it doesn't make him look less intimidating. Chris has seen him kill.

"Yes," Chris says. There's never any damn point lying to Alex. Guy's got a fooltight bullshit detector.

"Sorry about that. Good kid."

"Yeah," Chris says, but Alex is already walking away.

Chris finds a quiet corner and starts thinking about options.


	3. Chain

You still haven't cried.

You're typing up statistics, endless rows and columns of numbers, because you still can't walk properly. They feed you well. The food is better than in the tunnels.

Your foot is hurting in its makeshift splint. You'd think they'd treat their working prisoners better. You remember the Compound: you were a prisoner there, too, but you were pamperered like a prize-winning Persian cat, groomed and primped and almost loved.

These people don't pretend to love you. It's a relief, really.

 

You share a cell with someone you've never seen, because he works the night shift and you are asleep when he gets in, and you're eating when he gets up and leaves. The cell is tiny and dank, but you like the privacy. Before you fall asleep, you think about Chris.

 

You've been locked up for five days. You're lying on your narrow bunk, with your leg full of rolling, pounding ache and your head full of Chris. You have your hand between your legs, but you don't think you'll be able to take that any further, not with the pain radiating up from your ankle and knee. But you like to think and feel and pretend you're somewhere else, with Chris' hands on you instead.

The cell door clangs open. You stay where you are, keep your hand where it is, but you turn your head to look at the intruder.

He's young, tall and broad-shouldered, and he's dressed in the same grey pants and tank top as all the prisoners. He glares at you with narrowed eyes. You turn your head away.

Later, you wake up to hear him jerking off in his bunk. You're still cupping your own dick, and it's making a valiant attempt at paying attention, but when you move, your ankle screams its protest, and you're left lying there with the pain and the buzz of almost-arousal itching along the outer edges of your consciousness.

 

In the morning, after the wakeup buzzer jerks you out of a honey-slow dream where Chris bows his head and licks your stomach in lewd, wet laps, your cellmate says, curtly, "I'm Nick," and you tell him your name, and that's all you say to each other all day, even though you work in the same room for twelve hours, but when you're back in your cell and lying on your bunk and hurting again, you say, "stop that."

"What?" he says. "I can beat off if I want to."

"Yeah, but," you say, but you can't really think of any good arguments. You don't know him. You're not sure you want to.


	4. Bloom

JC makes lists, sometimes, when he has nothing to do, or when he's nervous about something. He knows he's a useless waste of air down here, so he makes a list of things he's good at. He speaks three languages - useless, because there is no one to talk to. He can write blank verse - useless, because there is hardly any paper, and what there is can't be wasted on poetry. He can sing - useless, because his voice echoes hollowly in the tunnels, and if he sings for long, someone comes and yells at him to shut the hell up. Sound travels oddly down here.

He had an orchid in his room, before. When he had a window. It was a hybrid phalaenopsis with thick, dark green leaves and a flower that looked like a yellow star with a smattering of dark red and purple.

Sometimes he lists places he's been. That's not a very long list.

*

They have a set time. Once a week, on Sunday evenings, seven pm. JC waits by the pump house behind the old fire station. He was on his way up when Chris caught up with him, grabbed his arm, wild-eyed and frantic. "Are you going to see Lance?" he asked, as if this was important, suddenly; as if he hadn't made a crack about JC's uptown boy just last night.

"Yes," JC said. He was a little late, and Chris was still hanging onto his sleeve.

"JC," Chris said. "JC. Justin's gone."

JC didn't say anything, because he couldn't think of anything profound enough. He thought it would happen. There was no way anyone could give up that much just to be with someone.

"Could you ask Lance to look around?"

JC frowned. That didn't make sense. "Why would Lance know where he went?"

"His dad's the fucking Chief of Police!" Chris snapped. "Of course he knows!"

"But--"

"They took him," Chris said, and JC could almost hear the 'you moron' he was holding back. "He was hurt. They took him."

"Oh," JC said quietly. Chris tugged at his sleeve.

"Ask him."

"Okay."

*

Now he's standing in the thick shadows by the pump house, listening to the humming of the machinery and making a list of everyone who needs him.

1\. Chris. 2. Justin.

It's a very short list.

Then Lance steps around the corner and into a circle of yellow streetlight, and JC adds him to the list. He wouldn't show up if he didn't need to, would he? He doesn't have to be here.

"Hi," JC says.

"Hi," Lance says. "Everything okay?"

"Yeah," JC says, because everything is okay, just now. Well, except - "I have to ask you a favour," he adds, reluctantly. He wants to help, he does. He wants to be useful, but it's hateful to keep asking Lance for things. He doesn't want Lance to think he only comes up to meet him because Lance's dad is the Chief of Police and it's good to have an inside connection.

But Lance just smiles gently at him and says, "sure, baby. What is it?"

*

"Chris was going nuts earlier," Joey tells him later, when JC is sitting on his mattress, bouncing Baby on his knee. "I think he's gonna try something."

"Like what?" JC asks. Baby stretches out her tiny hands at him and gurgles and grins toothlessly. She has Joey's thick, black hair, but her eyes are pale blue.

"He's gonna try to find Justin, I guess. Did you tell Lance to look around?"

"Yeah. He said he would," JC says, feeling a little pinch of pride.

"Go tell Chris, okay? I think he's down in the monitor room, yelling at them for not keeping an eye on the kid. Not like they could have done anything, but you know Chris."

"Yeah," JC says. He knows Chris, and he hands Baby back to Joey and goes to find him, and when he does, he hugs him and says, "It'll be okay," even though he knows it won't.

"I'm gonna find him, 'C," Chris says, and his eyes are flat and dark, like he's already looking down the barrel of a gun at whoever dared hurt Justin.

"I'll help," JC says, but his voice is a little shaky.


	5. Sweat

The new kid moans in his sleep. He twists and turns and whimpers and moans. Nick considers shaking him awake, but what's the point? He'd just fall asleep again. Or bitch about it. He seems the type to have a mouth on him.

The air in the cell is hot and dank, and he's been here for four and a half years and he's still not used to it. He always feels like he's about to suffocate, like the walls are moving slowly towards him. The oldtimers tell him that he'll start loving the walls, that once he gets out, he'll miss them and feel the world is too big. He doesn't think so. There are so many places to go in the world.

And with the moaning. "No, no, no," the kid whines. "Chris. Chris. No, help, help me--"

"For fuck's sake," Nick mutters. This can't continue. When he's awake, the kid - whatever his name is, something with a J, Jimmy? Joshua? something - ignores Nick, just stays on his bunk and stares at the wall, or clickity-clacks glumly on his ancient keyboard in the statistics hall.

He's sobbing now, wet little sobs, and Nick swings his feet over the edge and drops to the floor, cat-quiet.

There's a night light in the cell, and tears run gleaming down the kid's cheeks. Nick touches his shoulder, and he jerks and wakes up.

"What?" he says, annoyed, but his face scrunches up and he's reaching for his hurt leg. "Fuck--"

"You were crying," Nick says, and the kid scowls at him.

"I was not," he says, but he runs his hand over his face. "Shit."

"Look--" Nick says. The kid looks at him like he hates him, with wet, angry eyes. A few last tears cling to his eyelashes like fragile jewels. Nick can't remember when he last cried; it must have been before they caught him, before this new life started. "What was your name again?"

"Justin," he says. "I told you."

"I never remember names," Nick says, "I remember numbers."

"Yeah?"

Nick shrugs. He still likes showing off, it seems, because it feels good to say, "Your ID code is 445B-900-G79," and watch Justin's eyes widen.

"You just saw it once. Cool." The scowl has dropped off his face.

"It's a knack," Nick says. He's still crouched by Justin's bunk, starting to feel a little dumb. Justin winces and moves his leg gingerly. "Does it hurt?"

"Like hell."

"Sorry," Nick says and goes back to bed. He falls asleep and doesn't wake up until the guard raps on the door in the morning.

*

"Here," he says when the lights dim again and Justin is brushing his teeth, leaning awkwardly against the wall by the sink.

"Hnnh?" Justin spits and says, "what?" and Nick drops the pill into his palm.

"For the pain," he says and climbs into his bunk.

*

Twenty minutes later, Justin starts tossing and turning again. The fuck? Nick thinks.

"Hey," he says into the air above him, "hey, are you okay?"

"I'm great," Justin says, and his voice sounds a little funny. Lower, with a little extra drawl in it, sort of, well, sexier. Aaahm great. "Fuck, it's hot, though."

More rustling, and Nick gives up and peers over the edge. Justin is pulling off his shirt. "What's wrong?" Nick asks.

"It's hot." He's sweat-slick and gleaming in the dull, orange light, all the way from his feet to his shaved head, lying on the dun sheets like a giant party favour. "Is it hot in here?"

"Maybe you have a fever," Nick says, but when he climbs down, he's not thinking about fevers.

Justin hisses when Nick puts a hand on his forehead, showing perfect white teeth between perfect pink lips. He's hot to the touch, but not feverish.

"It could be the painkiller," Nick says.

"How did you get it?"

"I have my ways." He doesn't feel like sharing. Justin doesn't seem like a guy who'd understand that it's no big deal to give a guard a handjob for a favour.

"It doesn't hurt, though. My leg. So I guess it works."

He's still wincing, though, so Nick asks, "then what's the matter?" not impatiently.

"Nothing," he says. "Just. Whatever. Nothing." He squirms a little, a slow movement that makes the muscles in his chest and stomach flex in tempting little waves. "It's just fucking hot, man."

Hot in more than one way, Nick notices. The threadbare underwear isn't hiding much, and the heat is just rolling off Justin in waves. The first cellmate Nick had, when he was barely seventeen and still thought it was all a bad dream, was forty-five and had hair on his back and in his ears. When he started looking appealing, that was when Nick realised what life imprisonment really means. It means you cut down on your standards.

It's almost as if Justin's heat has crept into his skin, too; he feels sweat break out on his forehead, trickling down his back. He tugs off his shirt and kneels by the bunk.

This is a step up.

He puts his hand on Justin's stomach and strokes the velvet-soft, damp skin.

"What?" Justin mutters, but he moves restlessly under Nick's hand. "Oh."

Nick bends down over him. Justin looks up at him with eyes that are all pupil, huge and black. "It's probably a side effect," Nick says.

"Yeah," Justin says, "probably." When Nick slides his hand lower, Justin moves his hips, just a little nudge.

"Okay," Nick says, and pushes down Justin's underwear. It feels like the cell has turned into a sauna, and the air is saturated and heavy. His hand is slick on Justin's cock, easy slide, but he wants more, so he bends down and follows his fingers with his tongue, his hand with his mouth. Justin whimpers softly.

Nick keeps a hand on Justin's stomach and feels abs tense and shiver and bunch. He likes the skin there, likes the smoothness of it over firm muscle, thinks he maybe should have stretched this out a little, taken his time. Justin is beautiful and he's only been here for a week, and still he's perfectly pale, as if he's never seen the sun. Someone told Nick that they caught him in the sewers, but that can't be right. The sewer people are deformed; that's why they're sewer people. It's probably a mistake, and Justin will be returned to wherever he came from, and Nick will get yet another cellmate.

Justin comes with a tiny, muffled cry that sounds like a word, maybe a name, and when Nick looks up, he sees that he's got an arm thrown over his face.

"Are you okay?" he asks, and Justin takes down the arm and nods, but his eyes are glittering and wet.

"Yeah, I'm just," he mumbles, but he doesn't finish his sentence. Nick gets up. Justin doesn't seem entirely there, his eyes are unfocused and he's still panting, but when Nick starts to turn away, he reaches out with a limp, heavy arm, fingers sliding over Nick's thigh. "Hey, I can. wait."

"It's okay," Nick says, but he doesn't sound very convincing even to himself. Justin's face is flushed, and his lips are very red, wet and red and full, such a pretty mouth, and his eyes are dark and glittering and utterly stoned. He sighs and pushes himself up. He moves his leg with the clumsy splint carelessly. The pill was good for that much, at least; he's not in pain.

He's a little clumsy, like he doesn't do this much. Still, better than other cellmates, who wouldn't do it at all.

"Thanks," Nick says afterwards. Justin looks up at him blankly. Nick goes back to bed, and sleeps soundly.


	6. Star

It's been the longest week ever, Chris thinks. He's been through some long weeks in his time, but life's been calm lately, calm and good, ever since he first saw Justin stop and turn and stare right at him.

Chris remembers his hand dropping to his gun. Reflex, of course, but the thought makes him feel shivery and breathless. He's woken up in the middle of the night, from nightmares that always end with him drawing his gun and shooting, like he should have done. In the dreams, Justin always looks up at him with wide eyes that look a lot deeper blue than they are in reality and whispers, "why?" And Chris touches his wild curls like he's never done for real and kisses him, and catches the last breath with his mouth.

It's clearly his subconscious carrying some kind of delayed guilt for whateverthefuck he's done, and it irks him that his dreams aren't more original. Or at least sexier. He stops himself from thinking lustful thoughts about Justin when he's awake, because once he sets foot down that path, he'll never return, but dreams are dreams.

Chris is not good at waiting. He paces the tunnels because he can't sit still.

"We have a set time," JC says when he nags him to contact Lance right away. JC is usually a meek and quiet guy, but he can be stubborn as shit.

"Can't you just go see him? How long could it take to dig through the files? He could be sitting on the--"

"His dad is the Chief of Police," JC says softly.

"Exactly," Chris says, and JC just sighs and turns away. His face looks green-tinted and bony in the slanted light. His cheekbones are like razors. Chris reaches out and touches the tight, dry skin, feels the lines of sharp bone underneath. JC closes his eyes for a second and leans into the touch, and they stand like that while Chris tries to pretend he still believes he did JC a favour five years ago, when he brought him along.

Finally, JC ducks his head and Chris lets his hand drop. "I'll see him on Sunday," JC says. He looks so tired, like all his energy has leached out of him during five years of darkness and stench and bad food.

"Sunday could be too late," Chris says, and JC looks at him sharply, as if he's holding back a sharp retort. You should have looked after him better, then or Why did you bring him here at all?

"I know," he just says, though, and looks down, dejected. Chris feels guilty for making him feel guilty.

*

On Friday, he goes down a few levels and finally finds one of Alex's boys, a tiny guy with long hair in a ponytail that everyone just calls D. No one remembers his actual name anymore, and Chris is pretty sure D doesn't, either. D is security chief for the eastern grid.

"I saw him up there a lot," D says. "He liked going up."

Chris ignores the fact that D is talking about Justin in the past tense and says, "You told Alex he was hurt."

"Yeah. We found blood on the wall there. They carried him up, so my guess is he took a tumble and broke something important."

"Fuck," Chris says. D pats his shoulder.

"I don't think they'll harm him. They were just street cops, not Genotech patrols."

"Yeah," Chris says.

"They probably took him to the camp," D says casually. He's turned away from Chris and is staring at the grainy image of an empty tunnel on one of the monitors. Nothing is happening, but it seems very interesting, nevertheless.

Chris blinks. "What camp?"

"There's a working camp outside town. It's the district penitentiary, and that's where they take the non-citizens they pick up."

"How come I don't know this? Why do you know it?" It bugs him that he's not on top of this. He feels like he's letting his side down.

D tears his eyes away from the monitor, where nothing still keeps happening. "I have friends there."

"What, guards?"

He rolls his eyes. "Yeah, right." The monitor again. That particular shade of green must be addictive. Chris looks at D's shirt instead. It's thin, off-white cotton, with intricate patterns embroidered in red silk thread. The seam under the right sleeve had torn, and someone had sewn it back together with thick green yarn.

Chris clears his throat. D doesn't react. "Um. Well, thanks, man," Chris says.

"Yeah, no problem," D says to the monitor, but when Chris turns to head back, he says, "What are you gonna do?"

"Get him outta there," Chris says. D is actually looking him dead in the eye now, and it's almost a little uncomfortable. "What?"

"If you need anything," he says and looks down quickly. "If. Yeah. I can maybe help."

"What? Why?"

He shrugs, but it looks awkward, like he can't pull off casual, all of a sudden. "I have friends there, I said."

"Right. Thanks," Chris says and leaves.

*

He spots Joey when he's going up. "Where are you going?" he asks. Joey has Baby tied to his chest in a makeshift sling. She's quiet and wide-eyed.

"I'm going up to show Baby the sky." He looks down at her and touches her nose. "We're gonna see the stars, Baby. We'll name them, won't we?"

"Name one for me, Joe," Chris says.

"You okay?"

"Yeah."

"Any news?"

"Maybe."

"Tell me later." He climbs a few rungs and looks down at Chris. "We'll name one Justin, then. For luck," he says with a little grin.

Chris grins back, briefly, before he remembers why he needs the luck. "Oh, shut up," he says. "That's sappy beyond belief."

"Oh, you know you love it. You'll look for that star the next time you see the sky."

Joey disappears up the hole. Chris walks back to his rooms, and thinks about stars.


	7. Rebel

On Saturdays, they go out to the country house. It's been a tradition since Lance was tiny. Back then, Grandmother was still alive, and it was her house, meticulously clean and always smelling of fresh bread and lavender.

Father has his computer with him, and is typing up a report to the mayor. Lance drives. Mother's smile gets wider and wider the further away from the city they get. Even though her mother's gone, she still loves the old house.

After dinner, Lance sneaks out behind the house to have a cigarette. That's also sort of a tradition. He doesn't actually smoke, just out here. When he lights up, standing in the rose garden, huddled under a warm pink cascade of Constance Spry, he wonders why he bothers sneaking around. He does enough of that. In comparison, sneaking out to smoke and sneaking out to see an outlaw aren't really the same ballpark. Or even the same sport.

The heavy myrrh fragrance of the roses is strong and doesn't even fade when he smokes the cigarette down to the filter. When he was little, he sometimes hid under the golden-white overhangs of Mountain Snow, curled into a little ball, dizzy from the perfume of the garden, the carefully planned patterns of scent and colour that his grandmother had created over forty years. She never planted a rose without scent. She wouldn't have approved of smoking in the garden.

She wouldn't have approved of JC, either. But then, nobody does, and Lance feels like a rebel every time he thinks of him. He breaks a flower off the bush behind him, to bring along tomorrow. Then he realises that he'll have to explain the flower if he wants to take it with him back into town, and drops it on the grass.

They leave in the evening, and before he gets in the car, he runs back to the garden and tears a handful of petals off the Constance Spry and stuffs them in his pocket. He feels ridiculous, but he keeps his hand in his pocket, touching the petals, and he thinks he can smell them on his skin even long after he's wrapped them in a tissue and stuck them in his drawer, under his socks.

"Did you have a good time, Lance?" Father asks him at dinner.

"Yes," Lance says. He's eating his veal on autopilot. He's thinking about the petals in his drawer, and the photocopied pages of police records underneath them. There's a blurry mugshot of a young man on them, and Lance almost didn't recognise him, even though he's actually met Justin. They've shaved the floppy golden-brown curls off him, and he looks exactly like every other prisoner in the camps. Lance remembers his brief meeting with Justin, just a quick, "hi, man" and a bright grin, and Justin was gone again, trailing after JC's friend Chris like a puppy. JC blushed and looked down when he asked Lance if there was any way, any way at all Lance could, possibly maybe, just for a friend, and he'd understand if it wasn't a good time, but...

Father smiles at him, a stern, restrained Father-smile, and Lance smiles back. "Perhaps we could look at your project tomorrow, son," Father says.

"Sure," Lance says, but he bites his tongue with the next mouthful of delicate meat and blackcurrant sauce. He's pretty sure he'll be done by nine-thirty, but sometimes Father gets excited by science and talks Lance's ears off, and then it could easily stretch into the night, and JC will stand by the old pump house and wait, alone.

*

As it turns out, he's only half an hour late. He had to climb out through his bedroom window with the rose petals in his pocket and the papers carefully folded and stored inside his undershirt. JC stands where he always stands, in the shadow, nothing but a vague outline against the dirty grey brick wall.

"I found some stuff," he says at first, because he figures JC is worried about Justin.

"Chris will be glad," JC says. "Thank you." He stuffs the folded papers into his pocket without looking at them. His eyes glitter with reflected sodium light.

"I missed you," Lance says.

*

They have a mattress inside the pump house, hidden under a staple of crumbling terracotta bricks. Lance rests his head on JC's bony chest and listens to his heart tick off the seconds.

JC always smells strange, a little stale, a little dirty and smoky. His hair is long and never really clean, because they don't have enough soap down there. Lance sometimes gives him pieces of soap, but he doesn't want to do that too often, because he worries that JC will think he's being condescending.

Lance doesn't mind the smell. It's not like JC has a choice about what he smells like.

"I brought you these," Lance says, remembering. He digs the rose petals out of his jacket pocket. They're crushed and tattered, but the sweet, heady scent rises like smoke in the air, and Lance watches JC's eyelashes flutter. His chest heaves slowly as he takes deep breaths.

"Oh," JC says and picks the petals from Lance's hand.

Lance feels half-ridiculous, half-proud. "I picked them in my grandmother's rose garden," he says. JC's eyes look black because the only light in the pump house is the trickle of streetlight that sneaks in through the kudzu growing over the small windows, but Lance pretends he can see the blue. He's not sure why he knows that JC's eyes are blue; they've never met in daylight, have they?

JC kisses him, and he remembers the first time they met, suddenly. JC knocked him over, literally, came running into him like a startled deer, and they tumbled into a heap of knees and elbows on the gravel path that went between Maple and Third, rolled into the brambles growing along the dun concrete wall of 34 Maple Street, and Lance ended up on his back with JC's trembling weight pushing him painfully into the gravel and JC's frightened breath fanning hot and damp over his face.

It was a very romantic way to meet someone, Lance thinks. All he had to do was lie still under JC and not call out to the patrol marching past along Maple. He could tell even then that JC came from the sewers. The patrols would stop anyone in clothes that were noticeably worn, and JC's hair was far too long already, growing in tangled tresses of dirty brown over his ears, almost reaching the collar of his patched leather jacket.

He lay there for five minutes, at least, until JC scrambled to his feet and looked around with frantic eyes. Then he looked down at Lance and reached out a hand to help him up. "Are you okay?" he asked nervously. "I'm so sorry."

"It's okay," Lance said, and on an impulse, he added, "I'm Lance."

"JC," JC said, and looked around again. "Thank you."

"Do you want a cigarette?" he says now, and immediately wonders why he's thinking about smoke. JC smiles and shakes his head. His hand is folded in a loose fist around the petals, and Lance realises that the smell of roses is making him crave cigarettes. Years of conditioning. Strange.

"I don't smoke," JC says. "I used to, I guess. But we don't have cigarettes now. Or roses."

Lance has known JC for six months, and he's never asked why JC is living in the sewers. It seems somehow rude to ask about it, and JC has never volunteered anything. And now it slips out: "Why are you down there?" Maybe it's because of the roses.

"Because of Chris," JC says. "He liberated me."

Lance doesn't know what that means, really, but he doesn't ask. JC's eyes are hooded and distant. He tries to figure out what would be more horrible than living in tunnels under the ground. What would be so horrible that the tunnels would be liberation?

"Justin came because of Chris, too," JC says, suddenly. He sounds tense and uncomfortable, as if he's not used to talking without being prompted. He doesn't, usually. "But he didn't have to. He just came."

"Why?" Lance asks.

"He's in love with Chris, I guess."

"Wow," Lance says. "How-- When did that happen? Like, where did they meet?"

"Chris was doing some kind of sting ... thing. I'm not sure what he was doing. He has these projects. Maybe he was stealing something--" He breaks off and frowns. "Look, I shouldn't be telling you. Um. It's sort of."

"It's okay," Lance says and feels like the outsider, even though JC is the one living in the dark, stinking tunnels.

"No, it's just. Well, they just sort of ... saw each other, or so Chris tells me, and Justin followed him home." JC looks away, and Lance thinks about that day, lying flat on his back on the gravel under the brambles. Why didn't he just follow JC home?

*

Later, when he climbs back into his warm room and showers off the grime that JC leaves on his body, he tries to pretend that he still doesn't know the answer. He left JC standing by the open manhole, clutching the drying petals. He didn't even want to look down into the thick blackness of the sewer. He can't imagine what it's like to live there.

*

"There are more outlaws than ever," Father says over breakfast. "We're having problems."

Lance feels like a rebel again.


	8. Gaskets

Joey goes to Chris' room, but Chris isn't there. His bed looks, as per usual, like a hurricane touched down in it; clothes, books, unidentifiable gadgets left in haphazard piles, and the sheets on the floor. Justin's bed is immaculate. Justin was abnormally neat for a boy his age, Joey thinks.

Baby whimpers softly against his chest, and he strokes her head, the soft fuzz of black hair. She's probably hungry again.

*

He's making a list of parts he needs for the leaking pump when JC shows up. He's still glowing.

"Had a good time?" Joey asks. He needs gaskets, and they better not be used again. He wonders who he should ask. Alex's boys don't seem to care much about maintenance, and they bring him nothing but shit. "Hey, C, dude, you wouldn't know where I could get some new gaskets. Like, new new. The pump on level 3C is leaking again."

"Hang on," JC says and disappears into his room. He's back in a few minutes and hands Joey a box.

"Where'd you get these?" Joey asks when he's opened it.

"I went up early and filched them from a parked car," JC says. "You said you had a leaking pump yesterday."

"Yeah, and it's still leaking. Thanks, man." He claps JC on the shoulder, and remembers - "hey, didja see your boy?"

"I did," JC says, and can't seem to keep a delighted smile off his face. "Oh, right," he adds and digs a bunch of folded papers from his pocket. "I didn't look at these."

Joey looks. It's a police report, filled in by hand. The picture is blurry, but not unrecognisable. Christ, they shaved his head. John Doe, transient. Pen 46. Light labour. "Oh, Pen 46" Joey says. Baby is twisting in her sling, trying to reach the interestingly crackling paper. Joey holds both her hands in one of his.

"What's it mean?" JC asks, reading over his shoulder. "I can never make heads or tails of those things."

"It's the code for Federal Penitentiary 46 at Buck Bridge," Joey says. "I know, uh. I know someone there."

"Where's that?" JC's squinting at the form, as if he's sure there's a map there somewhere.

"Outside town, not far, but it's gonna be kinda hard to get him out. It's not like the camps. Well, it's a camp, but it's not. They have real prisoners there, too, like murderers and rapists. Not just, you know, the sanitised folks."

"Oh," JC says, and his smile has faded.

"It's okay, though," Joey says, "it'll be okay." JC looks at him, and he nods. It will be okay.

*

"Fuck," Chris says when they show him. "Fuck, that's a maximum security place, isn't it? I bet it is. Fuckers."

"It's not that maximum," Joey says.

*

There are things he doesn't talk about, that he doesn't want to talk about. Abigail is one: he can hardly think about her, even after six months. The guys respect that, most of the time. They don't meet his eyes when he comes back from the grave. He goes every week. He leaves Baby with JC or Chris and just sneaks down to the cemetery tunnel and spends ten minutes squeezing his hands into fists so tight that his fingers ache and tremble. Then he goes back and holds Baby and listens to her heart and her little gurgles and giggles.

Another thing he doesn't talk about is Abigail's brother. For one, he's not allowed to. "Yeah, oh, and if you mention I come around, I'll cut your fucking balls off," AJ says every time, and even though he usually smiles when he says it, or sneaks a hand down Joey's pants to cup said balls fairly gently, Joey doesn't make the mistake of thinking he's kidding.

For the other, Joey has no idea what to say about AJ, so it's just as well that he doesn't get to talk about him. AJ shows up once a month, just sneaks into Joey's room like a ghost, and god knows how he gets past security. Or past security at Pen 46, for that. Joey asked once, and AJ just shrugged and said, "All about knowing the right people, compadre. You know that." AJ always knew exactly who to know, who to talk to, who to bribe, who to flirt with or fuck, who to fuck up.

Baby loves AJ, laughs and drools at him and pulls at the hoops in his eyebrow. He lifts her high in the air and sings raunchy songs that Joey hopes she won't remember once she learns to talk.

"She's got Abby's eyes," AJ said last month, and he's the only one who can mention her and look Joey in the eye when he's doing it. He has a tattoo that says Baby on his chest. There's one that says Rosa on his shoulderblade, but he's never explained that one. Joey's not sure he wants to know.

"Yeah," Joey said.

"So, wanna fuck?" AJ asked and put Baby back in her crib.

"Yeah," Joey said.

They don't fuck much, but when they do, it's rough and hot and AJ is small and wiry and doesn't let Joey top, ever. Joey doesn't think it's because AJ is too macho to bottom, but just because AJ doesn't trust anyone enough to turn his back on them, not even Joey.

AJ keeps a cigarette behind his ear, and Joey has to tell him repeatedly that he can't smoke down in the tunnels. "Fuck," AJ says and puts the smoke back. "It's like the fucking pen."

"Why do you keep going back?" Joey asked once.

AJ shrugged and scratched his head. "Better than living in the fuckin' sewers, Joe-Bob."

"Don't call me Joe-Bob."

"Sorry, Mr. Fatone." He snapped his head to the side, shook his shoulders, said, "Well, visiting hours are over. Take care. Don't let the rats get the kid," and slunk out the door.

*

"I'm gonna try to get him out," Chris says. "There has to be a way."

"I know someone, maybe," Joey says and ignores the shiver that runs down his spine. "I'll look into it." Then he goes down to change the gaskets on the pump on level 3C.


	9. Love

Nick brings you a pill every night, and you take it. You know it makes you different, and you know you'll end up having sex with him, but it doesn't really bother you. The first morning after, you had a few moments of panic, but he was his usual glum self and you calmed down quickly. You don't tell him that you've never had sex with anyone before, that you were really waiting for Chris to catch on and be the first. You guess it doesn't matter. Any day now, someone could recognise the Genotech tattoo on your back, and they'll lock you up and throw away the key. Better to have fun while it's available, even if it is stoned fun with a guy who looks nothing like Chris and sounds nothing like him, and doesn't hold you afterwards.

You don't talk, until one day when you ask, out of spite, maybe, "Who do you think about?"

"What?" he says testily.

"When you're fucking me."

He bows his head over the thick ledger he's going through, hits a few keys on the calculator next to him. Makes a couple of notes. Your foot hurts again, and you're sick of typing numbers. Maybe he likes doing it, but you don't. He seems to like it here, in fact. He has friends he talks to in the dining hall, strange, tattooed weirdos who turn expressionless faces and eyes hidden behind sunglasses your way when you look at them. He talks to the guards, and you wonder what he knows about them, what he does for them to get the pills and special privileges he has.

You're used to routine. You're used to waiting, used to being bored, used to being alone with people who won't talk to you. Doesn't mean you like it. Life in the sewers wasn't easy, maybe, but it was never boring, and you miss Chris.

You hit the keys on the fucking stone-age computer you're using. Hard. And say, "I'm sure not thinking about you."

You're not sure why you're being a bitch to him. He's just some schmoe who had the bad luck of being bunked up with you. You stare at the computer. There's a huge spider walking across the screen. You're briefly tempted to squash it, just because. You don't. Instead, you close your eyes and picture your room down in the tunnels. Your bed. Chris' bed. You'd lie awake at night, sometimes, just to listen to him breathe. You think he must love you, because he let you tag along and he found you a bed and helped you carry it through the tunnels, and he didn't get angry all those times you were walking so close behind him that you bumped into him when he stopped. He just grinned and poked you in the stomach and said, "Sleepwalking again, J?"

You think he must love you, because you had nothing to give him, and he kept you anyway.

"I know who you're thinking about," Nick says suddenly, and you jerk out of your quiet moment and remember that you were picking a fight with him just seconds ago. "You call his name when you come, dumbass."

"Fuck you," you say, and that's it for the conversation. Ten minutes or so later, one of the guards comes in and nods sharply at Nick, and they disappear down the hall for a while.

You stare at the screen without seeing it. You wonder if it's something everyone gets, that feeling of just knowing when something important has happened. Opening a door, turning a corner and seeing Chris hunched over the torn-out guts of the alarm control box. Meeting his startled eyes and there it was. Click. Like a gosling follows blindly, you followed him.

You look over your shoulder at the rest of the inmates tap-tap-tapping away on their keyboards. Maybe it is just you.

Nick comes back, and one of his bad mofo friends is with him. Piercings, tats, sunglasses that seem surgically grafted to his face. He tilts his head and lifts an eyebrow.

"What?" you say. He ignores you.

"I gotta get back to work," Nick says.

"Don't exert yourself, Carter," the bad mofo says and leaves. Nick sits down in front of his console. You take a deep breath and try your best to get back into your head, but he's distracting, somehow, like a scratch in the roof of your mouth.

You blink and focus your eyes on the screen again, and you haven't done anything in the last half-hour, and you've typed CHRIS in at least three cells at random intervals. Nick's leaning back in his chair and smirking at you.

"Fuck off," you say, tiredly. Your foot throbs monotonously, and you're thirsty. You wonder if it's another side effect of the pills; you're thirsty all the time. You think maybe you should stop taking them.

But he gives you a pill at night, again, and you take it because your foot hurts and your head feels too small for your brain. Before you even lie down, he grabs you by the arms and pushes you against the damp concrete of the wall and kisses you. He's never kissed you before, but it's not bad, it makes you sweat and shiver, and he holds you up by your arms, his fingers digging into your biceps. You forget not to put pressure on your bad leg, and pain pierces the fog you're lost in, shoots up your ankle, radiates through your body, sticks icy daggers in your back. You twist your head away to gasp for breath, and he licks your neck, and your head is swimming and heavy and you fall helplessly against him.

You forget to pay attention to what you call out when you come.


	10. Scratch

It's like the world has been emptied of people, and all that's left is this little group of disparate souls, JC thinks. The camps were crowded. He grew up longing for space. The room he's living in now is larger than the room he shared with his entire family before he was moved to the working camp. This room is wallpapered with old newspapers, and pictures he carefully cuts out of magazines he finds in garbage cans.

He has a bed and a shelf made of bricks and boards. He has books and magazines. No one ever comes in here. There are never raids. He doesn't have a door, but the heavy blanket he's hung over the door opening is enough.

He has rose petals under his pillow. He pushes his hand under it and feels them, crushed and warm and a little crunchy around the edges already. Their scent is fading, but it still lingers in the bed.

He doesn't want to get up. The last time he felt this reluctant to wake up in the morning was just after they moved down here, and then Chris had been around to shake him out of it. Chris had trouble sleeping at all, and he could effectively keep JC awake. They'd fucked some, too, but stopped when JC met Lance. JC didn't think Chris was boyfriend material. That's changed, though, and now Chris has Justin, even though they're not actually doing anything yet. JC thinks Chris is waiting because he's afraid of fucking it up, because he thinks it's that important.

Of course, now Chris doesn't have Justin, and that thought gets JC out of bed, finally.

*

The tunnels are empty. He can walk around all day and not meet anyone. Most of the people have things to do, and hang out in the lower levels where Alex rules with an iron fist.

He turns a corner and walks into Chris.

"Fuck!" Chris mutters and rubs his side.

"Sorry," JC says. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing!" Chris throws out his hands, as if accusing the entire sewer system for this. "It's unnatural. I'm going nuts."

JC opens his mouth to say "it'll be okay," but maybe he's said that too many times already, so he closes it again.

Chris just glares at him. JC looks at the wall. There's a word freshly scratched into the concrete in large, jagged letters. FUCK. Oh, that's profound, JC thinks.

"Not a word, Chasez," Chris mutters. He's tense and jittery, and JC is worried, for a second, that he'll just let go and take a swing. At JC or the wall, or both.

"Is there anything I can do?" JC says.

"No," Chris says.

*

Later, he finds Joey and Baby in the common room, playing with dice on the rickety table. Baby's mostly trying to eat her dice, and Joey's patiently making her spit them out again.

"Hey," JC says.

"What's up?"

"Same old." He sits down next to Joey and looks at his hands. "Chris is a little..."

"Fucked up?" Joey quirks an eyebrow at him. "No shit."

"I wish--"

"There's nothing you can do, JC," Joey says and pats him on the shoulder.

*

He goes back to his room and lies on the bed. The picture next to his head is a panorama shot of a tropical beach: white as sun-bleached bone, the lagoon crystal-clear, glittering aqua, lightly topped with bubbly white where the waves break against barely submerged coral reefs. The jungle beyond the blinding white beach is a wall of lush, impenetrable green.

He looks away from it, stares at the ceiling, which is the same grey concrete as all the walls in all the tunnels for miles and miles around. He doesn't know how big the sewer system is; this is an old city, and the tunnels wind deeper and deeper in twisted, interlacing layers. Maybe Alex has a map.

JC has never gone exploring. Chris and Justin did, a couple of times: packed up backpacks with food and just went walking down a random hole, to return days later, dirty and exhausted and still laughing. They had stories to tell, stories about nothing, because nothing was all they found, nothing and more tunnels, but it was enough for them to be in each other's company.

*

He falls asleep and wakes hours later. He remembers dreaming about running through a Northern forest, stumbling over fallen branches, feeling twigs whip him in the face, but still running. He remembers not being afraid even though he was all alone.

His hand hurts, and for a second, the dream feels more real than the dank room around him. Then he realises he's scratched his hand on the rough concrete of the wall; there's a spatter of blood on the torn newspaper there. His other hand is in a tight fist under the pillow, crushing the dry rose petals into dust.

He's afraid now. He stumbles on his own feet when he gets up. His knuckles ache when he moves his hand. He hears footsteps outside his room.

He pulls the blanket aside so violently that it tears around the nail in one corner.

Chris stops and turns his head. JC shivers and reaches out. Chris has a backpack and his gun at his belt.

"Wait," JC says. "Wait."

"I can't," Chris says. His eyes are harder than JC's ever seen them before.

"Please," JC says and wraps his arms around Chris' neck, leans his head on Chris' shoulder. Chris is stiff and uninviting and seems to have stopped breathing. "I'll come with you tomorrow even if there's nothing," he says.

Chris relaxes so quickly it's like someone let the air out of him, and JC finds himself holding him up. JC thinks Chris might cry, but he doesn't. JC cries instead, with his face against Chris' neck. His scratched knuckles bleed on Chris' sweater.


	11. Skin

The tattoo is right between Justin's shoulderblades, over the spine. It's a circle the size of Nick's palm, with a double helix in natty primary colours. The base pairs are in pastels, and Nick is pretty sure they represent the beginning of the sequence for the haemoglobin beta chain. That would be the most likely cliché. "Valine, histamine, leucine, threonine..." he mutters into Justin's damp skin, and Justin moves slowly under him. "Nice tat," Nick says and licks the inked skin slowly. Justin shivers and makes a little noise. Nick holds his arms and pushes him down. When he licks the tattoo again, Justin arches his back.

"What are you doing?" Justin says after a while. There's a slur in his voice, like always once the painkiller kicks in. His hands are fisted in the rough sheets.

"Fucking you, I think," Nick says and moves, gives a sharp thrust.

"Oh-- Okay."

Nick isn't sure if he'd call it irony that he's fucking what he's pretty sure is Genotech's precious prototype, his father's greatest accomplishment. It might be irony. It might just be really amusing. He wonders if they're desperately trying to replicate their success now. He torched a lot of the research when he torched his father.

Justin hisses and cries out. Nick can't make out the words, but he knows. Whoever this Chris is, he's on Justin's mind a lot. It's sweet, but it doesn't make any difference in here. Justin's pliant and eager and yields under Nick's hands like clay, doesn't mind if it's rough or even painful. Afterwards, he's sweaty and languid and Nick is tempted to stay, let him curl up close like a pet.

Instead, he slips out of the bunk and takes a detour to the sink to splash lukewarm, rust-yellow water on the bits that need it the most. He meets his own eyes in the mirror, and looks away. Justin's fallen asleep where he lies, his face buried in the pillow, his legs still spread. Nick pulls the sheet over him and goes to bed.

*

AJ gives him a cigarette and says, "So, what does it mean? Is it something they'd pay for?"

"Are you kidding? They'd kill to get him back. When they find out he's in here, with a broken leg that's gonna heal crooked, they'll probably execute half the police force just out of spite."

"Sweet," AJ says and slaps Nick on the back. "I got a situation developing with the bible thumpers. I need the leverage."

"Sure," Nick says.

*

"Don't have any today. Maybe tomorrow or the day after," Richardson says. "You shouldn't be feeding him them for more than a few days at a time, either. He'll be useless for work."

"He's useless for work already," Nick says.

"I can give you plain morphine."

"Whatever."

Richardson gives him a narrow stare; he's got a face carved from bedrock, that guy, and Nick never knows when he's happy. If he ever really is. His expression doesn't change even when he comes.

*

The distressing part is how the call for quiet is like Pavlov's bell ringing, now. The lights dim, he gets horny. And it's only been a fortnight.

Justin's bright-eyed and expectant. He can't keep the eagerness off his face anymore. Oops, Nick thinks, he's hooked.

"Couldn't get any," he says, and Justin blinks and frowns.

"What do you mean?" he says, and there's a hint of a whine in his voice, a whine he's probably not even aware of, the junkie whine.

"I mean there's none to be had. It's a seller's market, kid."

"But--"

Nick takes the two steps from the wall to the bed and pushes Justin back down on the bunk. He resists for a fraction of a second, and Nick sees his expression flash to anger and back to blank neutral. "Shut up," Nick says.

"Hey--" Justin says, "hey, you're not gonna--" but he's folding back and Nick figures he's hearing the bell, too, and he only has to push a little harder than he usually does.

The skin on Justin's arms shivers into goosebumps when Nick runs his hands over them. He feels cold under Nick's hands, not hot and smooth like before, and Nick thinks it'll be a long night.

"Fuck, fuck--" Justin mutters, and now Nick has to keep him down, because he's trying to move away, turn away, and that's not cool. "Fuck, it hurts, man, let go."

"Shut up," Nick says again, and Justin falls quiet, but he's still shivering, and Nick can't believe it starts so soon. Maybe it's just the knowing that there won't be relief. Maybe he's faking it. "Turn over," he mutters and pulls at Justin's shirt, pulls it off. Justin moves too slowly and Nick pushes him around, tugs down his boxers.

Justin makes a sound somewhere between a groan and a cry, and Nick claps a hand over his mouth and feels his breath puff hot and harsh on his fingers, and he slips a couple between Justin's lips, and between his teeth into his mouth. Justin bites down, maybe reflexively, and that's not bad, it sends quick tendrils of heat through his stomach and down, and it suddenly occurs to him that AJ might be out making a deal right now, and Justin could be gone in a day.

"Mpphh," Justin mumbles around his fingers, and Nick pulls his hand away. "Fuck you," Justin says, "fuck you, just give me a fucking-- f-fucking--" and Nick claps the hand back on his mouth.

It's going to be a hassle to do this if Justin's set on making as much noise as possible, and Nick wonders if he's doing it on purpose. He tries to decide whether he misses the slow, sweet, languid drugged Justin, but maybe this is better, this raw battle where he's still coming out on top because Justin is too wounded and too addicted and too conditioned into spreading his legs at the sound of Nick's voice to put up a real fight.

Justin shivers and tries to turn his head away from Nick's hand, but Nick holds him down with his body, twists his arm behind his back and pushes his knee between his legs. Justin gasps against his hand and stops fighting, lets Nick pry his knees apart.

It is different; not so much a hassle as tougher going. Justin isn't fighting, but his body is; none of the pliant give, but resistance everywhere, hovering just above painful. Sweat is breaking out all over Nick's body, and Justin is already slick with it; it's gathering in droplets in the hollow between his shoulderblades, on the smooth surface of his skin, on the bright orange and blue of the tattoo. Nick bows his head on a thrust and slides his tongue up along Justin's spine all the way to the stubble at the back of his neck, and Justin whimpers into his hand. Nick feels his teeth again.

The cell is stifling hot, a fucking oven with no window or air conditioning, just a small vent in a corner. He knows his skin is flushing red all over; every breath is like pulling in a soggy stew of distilled prison air, stale and heavy.

Justin is chilly and damp, like he just rose out of the ocean. The muscles in his back are tight and trembling and he's whimpering softly, and Nick feels a brief twinge of conscience, or something related to it, but then Justin bites his hand hard, maybe hard enough to draw blood; it stings like a bitch, and bucks under him and Nick bites his neck in return and thrusts sharply, faster, pushing Justin into the bed.

Justin twists underneath him, almost gets his hand loose, thrums with tension, shudders and his shout is muffled but still loud enough, too loud, and Nick tears his hand away and slams Justin's face into the thin pillow, ruthlessly.

"Shut UP," he whispers, and feels Justin relax, just go limp, and realises that he just came.

He lets go of Justin's head. Justin turns his face away from the pillow and draws in a huge breath and says, "Fuck you, Carter, just--" and Nick puts his sore hand back over his mouth.

He thrusts twice, and then Justin licks the bitemark on his hand, sharp little tongue drawing a line of bright pain across his palm, and he yells when he comes, too.

*

"Why did you--" Justin says after a while, when Nick's sweat is starting to dry on his back and Justin's still cold and trembling. "Why did you. Why did you--" but that seems to be all he's capable of saying, so Nick rolls off him, wrung out and a little puzzled as to why he's still lying in Justin's bunk.

"What, didn't you like it?" he says and looks at the rough boards of his own bunk above them. Justin's turned his face the other way, and his shivers run deep and resonant through his body; it's like lying next to some sort of machinery. He's snuffling softly into the pillow, and Nick realises he's probably crying. He squirms and thinks about getting up, but he's worn out and post-coital languid and his eyes are falling shut.

"No," Justin says. "I hated it. I didn't. I wanted--"

"Missing your boy?" Nick asks and thinks, wow, we're having a conversation or something. Pillow talk with the prison bitch. Justin must be in pretty bad shape if he wants to talk. They've probably said twenty lines to each other in these two weeks.

Justin doesn't answer, just pulls in a shivery breath and then suddenly moves sharply, staggers out of bed, swears when he puts weight on the bad foot and almost falls, would have fallen on his face, in fact, if Nick hadn't been quick and caught him around the waist.

"I'm gonna--" Justin blurts and throws up on the floor.

"Oh, FUCK you," Nick says, but he gets a bunch of wet paper towels and mops it up, because Justin's curled into a ball on the bunk, clutching his stomach and moaning.

"It's your fault," Justin whispers much later, in between shivers. "You did this." He sounds almost surprised.

"Yeah, tough shit," Nick says and goes to fill his mug with water again.

*

He remembers the morphine about an hour later and almost punches the brick wall with frustration. Moron, moron. Three hours 'til wake up call, and he hasn't had a wink of sleep.

It's in one of those little ampullas the military has for emergencies, and he sticks it into the skin on Justin's thigh. It takes roughly ten seconds, and then Justin stops shaking.

"Why didn't you give me that before?" Justin says. "Do you like it when I puke my guts out on the floor? You sick fuck."

"Shut up and go to sleep," Nick says. He doesn't climb up into his own bunk until after Justin's asleep, just lies quietly and stares at the Technicolor tattoo on Justin's back and listens to his breathing calm down.

*

In the morning, the guard has to bang on the door several times before they wake up, and when he comes in, he makes a face and says, "What the fuck have you two assholes been up to? It's like an apehouse in here. Christ," and they have to stay in for an hour and clean the whole cell. Justin's pale and slow and doesn't speak a word.

Nick thinks it's just as well that he'll be gone soon. Just as well.


	12. Eye

Lance checks the files every night. He sneaks into his father's office and looks through the folders in the antique oak desk. He accesses the files on the computer; he's got the passwords because his father was forgetful once, and left them on a slip of paper on the desk. He feels like a spy, and it makes his hands shake and his heart hammer wildly against the inside of his chest.

Then he creeps back to his room and lies breathless in his bed and tries to remember the salty, sharp taste of JC's skin and the way he sighs when Lance kisses his throat.

*

On Thursday, he finds something. It's just a footnote, but he pricks his ears every time he sees the word 'Genotech', so he notices. He reads and thinks, suddenly, I could do it now. I could.

"You've been going out a lot, son," Father says when Lance is putting on his coat. "I hope it won't affect your studies."

Lance has inherited Father's pale eyes, but where Lance's are merely a peculiar trait, Father has perfected an icy, penetrating stare that makes Lance feel like a bug squirming on an entomologist's pin.

"It won't," he says.

"Very well," Father says, and Lance slips out the door. His bag thumps heavily against his hip when he tries not to run down the stairs.

*

It's a different quiet in the tunnels, not at all like the quiet of the empty street above. The quiet here is bigger, and every sound becomes bigger, too, with the echo bouncing eagerly between the dirty walls and the wet ground and the rounded ceiling. Lance finds himself creeping along one side of the tunnel.

He never realised there were so much space down here. There are smaller tunnels forking off the big one he's in, in both directions. He has no idea where he's going.

*

After two hours of walking, he's starting to feel like he should be outside the city limits already. The tunnel looks exactly the same here as it did where he first came down.

He picks a side tunnel at random and turns right. It seems to slope downwards, and that's good, right, he wants to go down.

He clears his throat. "Hello?" he says, and his voice skips on the walls and turns hollow and booming and fades into the darkness outside the bowl of light from his heavy police-issue flashlight. He feels stupid, talking to himself.

The tunnel ahead of him looks the same as the tunnel behind him, and he's sure that if he twirled around a couple of times, he wouldn't know which direction he came from.

He turns around, and there's a small group of people standing thirty yards from him, in a loose formation that looks both casual and somehow, ominously military.

"Are you lost?" one of them, a short guy with curly black hair flowing down his back, says. They're all wearing dark clothes, not quite uniforms.

"I guess I am," Lance says.

"We'll take you back," the guy says and they all take a step forward. Lance takes one backward and puts up his hands.

"no, no, wait--"

"You can't be here," the guy says. He's keeping his voice low, but he's got a gun in his belt, and his friends stand in rigid poses, like police dogs waiting for a signal.

"I'm looking for JC," Lance says. "Um, JC--" and this is when it occurs to him, maybe for the first time, that he really doesn't know anything about JC. Not even his last name, or what the J and the C stand for. John or Jack or Jim, Carter or Culkin or Crane--

They're coming towards him, and he wants to run. He's always surprised by how not scary JC is, after all the stories he's heard about the sewer people, but now he realises that these are the people the stories are about, these are the people who'll kill him and leave his stripped body by a manhole at the edge of town.

He backs up even more, and the short guy nods at his companions, and they close in on him, silent and fast, and he hardly has time to turn before there are hands on his arms, holding him still.

"Don't struggle," the guy tells him, and someone slips a sack over his head. It's rough burlap and scratches his face and smells stale and mouldy, and their hands push at him like a many-legged creature, and he walks.

There are turns, left, right, and stairs down, and at a few points, they make him climb down ladders. After what feels like about twenty-four hours, but is probably no more than thirty minutes, they pull off the sack, and there's light in the hall, and brightly coloured paintings of trees and birds and fields along the walls.

In a bare room, they push him down in a chair and leave him. Someone takes his bag.

He waits and keeps himself from chewing his nails. His mother would smear Tabasco on his fingertips when he was little to keep him from doing it.

The door opens, and he hears JC's voice say, "--are you talking about? I haven't--" and he looks up and sees JC stand frozen in the doorway.

"Hey," Lance says and squeezes his shaking hands between his knees. "I have to tell you something."

*

He remembers Chris as a fast-talking guy with a quick grin and sarcastic humour, who'd at some point suddenly and curiously grown a tall, fluffy-haired shadow. Now he's narrow-eyed and dour, and his eyes are sharp and unforgiving, and he turns to JC the second he comes into the room and says, "are you fucking NUTS? You told him where we are?"

"He's got something to tell you," JC says patiently, and strokes Chris' shoulder gently. Lance has to force his hands from curling into fists.

"What?" Chris says and turns to Lance. "What do you know?"

Lance swallows and says, "Someone's notified Genotech that their property has turned up in Pen 46. There was a short report, I've got the print--"

"Fuck," Chris says frantically, "fuck, fuck, fuck--"

"Chris, wait," JC says and puts his hands on his shoulders, leans in. Lance looks down. "Let him finish. We have to make plans. Okay?"

"But--"

"Plans."

Chris pushes against JC, and Lance wants to yell at him to stop bitching and for fuck's sake, stop making JC look at him with concerned eyes. Instead he pulls the crumpled paper from under his shirt, takes a breath and says, "Prisoner 445B-900-G79 is Justin, I double-checked. He shares a cell with prisoner 984A-900-TT9, Nickolas Carter."

They don't react; JC is still holding Chris' shoulders. Lance clears his throat. "Carter," he says. "Nick Carter? Doesn't ring a bell?"

"Should it?" Chris says curtly.

"It was all over the news five years ago--"

"We don't get the news here," JC says, "or in the camps."

Lance looks back at his paper. His hands are leaving sweat smudges on the white surface. "Carter's father was head of the genetic research labs at Genotech."

"Oh, sonofabitch," Chris mutters. "I'll fuckin--"

"He'd recognise Justin. He wouldn't hesitate to use the knowledge. I think--" but he never gets to finish his sentence, because Chris twirls around, wild-eyed and punches the wall so hard Lance feels it in his own knuckles.

JC puts his hands over his face like a frightened child, and Chris swears loudly, desperately. His hand is dripping blood on the concrete. Lance wants to do something but can't seem to move. He has no idea how they handle things down here. He has no idea what Chris means to JC.

JC's hands fall from his face. "Chris--" he says.

"Shut up," Chris snaps, and now Lance moves, gets out of his chair, his legs moving independently of his thoughts, and he almost reaches Chris before JC's hands are on his shoulders, JC's voice whispers in his ear,

"Don't--"

"Sorry," Lance says and stops staring at Chris. After a little while, the door slams.

"He's so afraid," JC says softly and Lance nods.

"I know. I know." He leans closer to JC, so close that he can smell JC's skin, that smell that's not clean but not unpleasant, either. "I had to tell you, I thought. I don't know if there's any way to get him out, but I thought I'd--"

"Thank you," JC says and kisses him, just briefly, and it's a little hard to breathe. Lance is suddenly too aware of how deep down they are; not that he knows how deep the sewer system goes, but he can feel the weight of the earth and concrete and rock above him. It's like being blind, somehow, not seeing the sky, no windows, no doors that open into the outdoors, no trees or flowers or anything.

"We can go to my room," JC says. His hands are gentle on Lance's shoulders, and he's warm and beautiful and welcoming. And he looks happy, the way a man on his dying bed can be happy if a nightingale sings outside his window.

There are no nightingales here, either. I can't, he thinks. I can't. I can't.

"I have to get back," Lance says. I can't, I can't, I can't.

JC lets go of him and takes a step back. "Okay," he says and rubs his neck. "Okay. I'll take you up."

His bag lies abandoned in a corner. "I brought you some. Um. Some stuff," he says and pushes it into JC's lap. JC looks down at it. "It's, um. Stuff. Underwear and, um. Shampoo and razors. Things. I figured you didn't have that much stuff. I thought. Um."

JC looks at him, and Lance feels his face heat. JC looks tired and there are dark circles under his eyes. He's pale. They're all pale down here, even Chris, who shouldn't be pale, not with his colouring. JC is ghost-white and Chris is sallow, and Lance remembers that Justin's skin was a perfect pale rose and cream colour.

"Thank you," JC says. "We don't."

*

JC doesn't come all the way up. He stops and says, "Just keep going down this one and you'll come to the main tunnel. Just pick any exit."

Lance kisses him, and when he starts walking and looks over his shoulder, JC waves at him without smiling.

*

He climbs into his room through the window, and the note he left for his parents is still on his desk. He burns it in the fireplace in the sitting room and doesn't cry.


	13. Nerve

Joey doesn't sneak out to meet AJ, because he doesn't like sneaking, and it's not like Alex' boys aren't monitoring everything, anyway, but he definitely walks stealthily.

He left Baby sleeping on JC's chest. JC didn't ask him where he was going. Joey's worried about JC. He's worried about Chris, too; Chris was just pacing his room, muttering to himself, and it took over half an hour of cajoling before he sat down and let JC clean the deep scratches on his knuckles.

He's worried about Justin, too, and that's why he's standing in a side tunnel so low he has to duck his head, and he's left a message for AJ on the number AJ told him to never use unless he wanted his balls cut off.

He wishes he was limber enough to kiss his balls goodbye.

*

He's ready to start pacing, himself, but he leans against the wall and relaxes. He blinks and turns his head, and AJ's standing not ten feet from him.

"Talk fast, Joe-Bob," he says.

"Look, I'm sorry--" Joey starts, but AJ holds up a hand.

"Don't be sorry, talk fast. Time's a-wasting."

"Right. Uh. This friend of mine got busted a few weeks ago, and I wouldn't have come to you, but it's starting to look sort of--"

"So what makes you think I'd help you?"

Joey figures this is where it counts, and he tries his best to look unfazed, but AJ's outlined against the dirty orange light streaming in dusty rays from the larger tunnel behind him, and even though Joey's never been afraid of him, he's always known to walk soft and stay non-confrontational.

"You're the only one I could turn to on this," he says. "Had to give it a shot."

"Who got busted? Mean that much to you, he your boy or something?"

"Chris' boy," Joey says, "Justin. Someone sold him out. It might be too late already."

There's a silence, and then AJ relaxes minutely, chuckles roughly. "Don't think your Chris' gonna want his boy back, anyway."

Joey bites his teeth together for a second, takes a deep breath and says, "Chris will always want him back."

AJ quirks an eyebrow, reaches for the pack of cigarettes he has in his chest pocket.

"You can't light that in here," Joey reminds him; this is standard. He's said that a million times, and every time, AJ shrugs and puts the cigarette back in the pack.

This time he puts the cigarette in his mouth, instead, almost nervously. Not nervous, Joey thinks, not nervous; pissed off.

"I guess Chris is a sucker."

Joey thinks about Chris, about Justin, about how Chris gets nervous when Justin's not in the room, about Chris without Justin: cranky, edgy, so very, very angry. "He's gonna try anyway. He's gonna kill himself trying. You gotta--"

He's forgotten, somehow, just how fast AJ moves, panther-sleek and so fast Joey can only blink in helpless surprise, even though he's hardly surprised once he gets a second to think about it. He jerks backwards and bangs his head against the wall, and AJ's a coiled spring of deadly intent, and Joey knows what AJ can do with that switchblade; he's been around to wash the stains away more than once.

"I don't think you should demand things of me, Joe-Bob," AJ says softly, no more than a cigarette-roughened whisper in Joey's ear. Joey closes his eyes and stays absolutely still. He doesn't think AJ wants to kill him, but then again, AJ's never been predictable.

"Chris is my friend," Joey says slowly.

"This is where you lose me, buddy."

"Who do you think makes sure there's food for Baby? We take care of each other."

AJ backs off as quickly as he'd attacked, click of the switchblade retracting and then he's standing three feet away and Joey sags against the wall, lets out a breath.

"One day I'm gonna light this here and we'll all blow sky high," AJ says and replaces the cigarette in his mouth. Joey can't say where he kept it while he was pressing a knife against Joey's throat. AJ's just full of little tricks like that. "Okay, Fatone. Just give me a good reason."

Joey shrugs helplessly. AJ cocks his head; with his sharp eyes fixed on Joey, he looks a little like a curious blackbird. "It could be fun," Joey says.

*

When he gets back, JC's asleep on his bed with his arm around Baby. Joey lets them be; neither wakes up when he turns and goes outside again.

"Who did you meet?" Chris asks him. He's standing in the tunnel outside, pinched face and dark-ringed eyes, but humming like a live wire, brimming with nervous energy. And anger. Always the anger. The bandaged hand is curled into a tight fist that must hurt like hell.

"Family," Joey says and gives Chris the slip of grimy paper AJ wrote the coordinates on. "He'll arrange a distraction."

He doesn't tell Chris that AJ laughed gleefully and said, "It's time for some bloodshed, anyway. Rape, riot, rage, revolution, baby." Or that he added, just before he left, leaning down over Joey, eyes still a little post-coitally glazed, "I don't take responsibility for the kid's condition. You know how it goes."

"A distraction?" Chris says.

"We'll just walk right into the basement and pick up the kid, walk right out."

It sounds really simple. "Walk right out," Chris says.

"Yeah," Joey says.

"Are you gonna-- You don't have to come."

Joey looks around, back towards his room, sleeping JC and sleeping Baby curled together like a stray cat with her kitten.

"I'm going even if you don't come--" Chris says, and Joey says,

"What about him?"

"He'll come, but."

Yeah, but. JC is less scary than a stray cat; there are pedigree lapdogs more threatening. "I guess. I have to, um."

Baby whimpers in her sleep, gurgles and whimpers, and JC hums softly and she falls silent again. Joey wants to lift her out of JC's arms, because she's his, she's a part of him, and JC can't keep her safe.

Chris is staring at him. Joey can meet his eyes because he knows no one else can take care of Baby; if he didn't love her and protect her, nobody would. Not Chris, with his pretty, strange obsession; not JC with his uptown boy.

"Yeah, okay," Chris says. "It's okay. D said he'd help. Whatever that meant. It's not like we're going to war."

"Okay," Joey says and goes to wake JC.


	14. Sweet

You shudder out of a nightmare and Nick's staring down at you with impassive eyes.

"What?" you say, and you can't keep the whine out of your voice. It's like it's tied to him; he looks at you and you're a helpless infant.

Then you hear the screams, the racket of metal clanging against metal, was that a gunshot?

"Go," he says. You scramble to your feet, clumsily; you still can't put weight on the bad foot, so you stumble and would have fallen if he hadn't caught you, roughly, with careless fingers digging into your biceps. He doesn't let you, but looks into your face with his eyes narrowed, his mouth twisted in something like disgust. "Go," he says again. "Laundry 2, there's a utility closet there. The lock is broken."

There are more gunshots; they must be gunshots. The screaming is sounding too rhythmical, too planned; almost like chanting. "What--" you try again, but he shakes you impatiently.

"Listen! Wait in the closet and keep quiet."

"Wait for what?" He scowls at you, at your stupidity, but you have no idea what's going on and your head is splitting with morning pain, and he's shaking you like you should catch on from just the way he wiggles his eyebrow or something.

You hear running feet in the hall outside and something or someone bumps hard against the cell door. "They're gonna--" He looks around, back at you. "Fuck."

*

The headache just gets worse when you get out of the cell. The air smells scorched and poisonous, like burning rubber or oil. Nick waves at you impatiently, and you hop after him. The walking stick keeps you upright, but you can't run, and it looks a lot like running would be the best idea. You still don't know what's going on.

When you stumble, he grabs you and drags you along. "You wanna get killed, idiot?" he hisses, and you want to tell him to stick it and leave you alone, but he wouldn't listen, and you really don't want to get killed.

"Get them, get them, GET THEEEEEEEM!" someone screams and it's right around the corner, close, really close, and Nick's fingers bite into your arm and he whips you around and get you pressed against the wall before they come, a horde of men, all ages, some bleeding, some just screaming out loud in inexplicable rage.

"What the fuck?" you say, but your voice doesn't carry in the clamour. Your face is flush against the wall and Nick's arm is tight around your shoulders.

"It's a distraction," he shouts into your ear, and even at this distance, it's just a rough whisper on a gust of hot air and you can barely make it out.

*

Things are a little calmer once you get down the stairs, but you almost step on the still body of a guard, and the only dead body you've seen until then was a cadaver the students were picking through at the Compound, and they didn't let you watch for long; just long enough to leave an impression. And it was nothing like this, the screaming crimson of the blood on his slack face, the dumb marble-shine of his eyes.

Nick steps around him, doesn't look down, but his face is even more determined after that, closed down, and he swears when you stumble, long, inventive strings of language he's picked up from his foul-mouthed gangster friends. You wonder if the guard meant something to him; you don't have a name for the sharp-angled face, but you remember that he was neither soft nor a hardass.

"Where are you going?" someone yells, and Nick freezes and turns slowly, his hand fisted in your shirt.

"He can't run, I gotta hide him somewhere," he says and nods at you. They walk towards you, their shorn, tattooed scalps shining. They fix you with unkind eyes, but they quickly turn away, dismissively.

"That's sweet," the largest one says, "stow the bitch and get your ass back in line, then."

*

There are more stairs, but Nick stops at the top of the staircase. "Go, go on," he says. "You know where it is, don't you? Sit tight."

You want to ask what's going to happen, but he's pushing you towards the steps, with both hands, a little less rough than before, almost gentle, almost as if he's reluctant to just push you into action and get out of there.

Then he says, "Try to stay alive," and he's gone, back where you came from. You blink in the stinking, smoke-thick air and look after him. The sounds of the riot are like a separate entity, rattling from wall to wall, and that's what pushes you on, finally. You stagger down the stairs, faster than your foot likes, but you can't stop to rest; the pain suddenly seems more bearable than the stench and the noise. You lean heavily against the wall, and you can almost run, at a lopsided, weaving gait. When you reach the nondescript grey door of the closet, you almost fall on your face as it opens without resistance.

You pull the door closed behind you and sit on the floor, a little uncomfortably, but it's quiet and dark, and you lean against the wall and close your eyes. The dark feels safe, like the tunnels where you live. You think past your aching head and your shivering hands and your broken foot, and you know that Chris is coming for you. You'll stay alive.


	15. Ire

Now that they're on their way, he wishes he'd just forced Joey to come along. Joey's a veteran next to JC, who holds a gun gingerly like it's a stick of dynamite with sparks flying out of the top.

D is quiet and professional and reassuring; a soldier without ego, thank god, not pulling rank, even though he probably could. When Chris went down to tell him it was now or never, he was standing in front of a monitor with Alex, speaking softly, almost intimately. Alex shrugged when D cut his eyes to him for leave.

"Goodbye," he said, stiffly, and D laughed mirthlessly. Chris looked at his shoes, because it felt like he was intruding on something private. D muttered a short "sir" and followed Chris up.

Now D walks next to him and doesn't speak until they're already approaching the sealed zone around Pen 46.

"Alex will cut the power for fifty seconds," he says. "It should be enough."

"Yeah," Chris says and unholsters his gun. JC takes a step backward and D glances at him, glances at Chris. "He'll be fine," Chris says.

"What kind of distraction was your contact talking about?" D asks softly. He's looking at JC again, not unkindly, but JC shrugs uncomfortably and looks down.

"If this is who I think it is," Chris says, "it'll be a full-scale riot in there."

*

He starts thinking it's a bad idea, bringing JC, when he realises he most likely wasn't exaggerating. He hasn't seen AJ McLean in over five years; he has no idea how Joey found him, but there is no other possibility, really. Joey with an inside contact? And AJ always had a certain sense of whimsy, in combination with the patented McLean taste for the grand gesture. Abigail had been the same. Low-key until she hit Joey with a surprise party for his twenty-second birthday, or decided to buy him a new pair of jeans from an Upground store in the middle of the day. She must have been disappointed in her small death.

He turns to JC so quickly that JC walks into him. JC's eyes are completely guileless. A dying breed, a man who can't lie to save his life. And dying for a reason.

"It'll get ugly," Chris says. "It'll definitely get a little ugly, and it'll probably get even uglier than that."

JC blinks and swallows and nods sharply.

"You can--" he starts, but JC says, almost too quickly,

"Don't tell me to stay behind." Chris hears the please JC holds back with some effort.

Later, Chris thinks he could have forced JC to stay in the tunnel; JC would have obeyed, unlike Justin had he been there instead.

But he's thinking about Justin now, he's a few measly yards of raw earth and concrete from Justin, so he says, "I won't," and presses on.

When it does get ugly, it happens quickly. AJ's not the only one who knows to use the tunnels, and right now, everyone's the enemy.

Chris and D fire simultaneously. When the echo dies down, there is blood spreading into a shallow pool on the tunnel floor, and JC is holding his gun in white-knuckled hands.

"I'm sorry," he says, but to his credit, he doesn't falter when he has to step over the still-twitching corpses to follow Chris.

*

There are more, and they're all armed with tasers and nightsticks, and maybe they don't need to die, but they're vicious and angry, and Chris is angry, too.

He hasn't had time to be pissed at Joey for sitting on his goddamn inside contact for this long, for these long, fucking agonising weeks. But he will. His hand still aches, but he thinks he wouldn't mind hitting something. Pulling the trigger isn't enough; he wants to pound them to a bloody pulp, he wants to kick in heads, he wants to stomp them into mincemeat.

JC touches his shoulder, and he almost blows his head off, almost. "Don't fucking DO that!" he snaps, but JC doesn't jerk back.

"We'll find him, Chris," JC says. "We'll all be okay."

Thinking about Justin now, after dirty killing thoughts, is soothing like a cool drink. Justin is here somewhere. The odds are on their side.

"I'm coming for you, kid," he mutters, and JC smiles reassuringly at him.


	16. Blood

At some point, Nick looks down at his hands and sees that they're covered in blood.

He holds them out to AJ, who laughs and says, "That's, like, symbolism or something." Nick rubs his hands on his pants.

They're entrenched behind a pile of overturned benches and desks. AJ's already confessed, with an unrepentant grin, that the riot is officially out of his hands. "There are some real fucking nuts out there. Didn't see them coming." He fishes a cigarette from the pack in his breast pocket and lights it. "At least we can smoke inside now."

"How long do you think they'll keep it going?" Nick asks, because the chaos hasn't died down at all in hours. In fact, it seems to be escalating. He wonders if every man has a berserk in him. He doesn't remember all the details of killing, but he has blood on his hands and there's a dead man next to him. Nick even knows his ID number, if not his name. Mr 698F-909-G21 worked in the cafeteria. Now he lies on his back in the corridor, half-buried under a pile of scorched towels.

"Til they fuckin' drop," AJ says. He nods at Mr 698F-909-G21. "Classic. Nothing really beats the old blunt instrument, huh?"

"I guess not," Nick says and looks away from the slickly red-white mess of blood and brains and bits of skull. It's been a while since he really really needed to kill anyone. He must have wanted to now, if he put that much energy into it, but he can't remember. There's a fuzzy patch there somewhere; between turning away from Justin, leaving him pale and blinking stupidly at the top of the basement stairs, and right now, sitting calmly on the floor between AJ and this dead man whose name Nick can't remember because he never remembers names.

He rubs his hands on his pants again, leaving maroon stains on the grey cotton. Symbolism or something.

This whole thing makes him wonder. He knows bits and pieces. None of it makes sense to him, though. All this, all this blood and fire and chaos for a pretty piece of flesh who should be glad to go with Genotech, because they would pamper him until he dies fat and happy and peaceful.

A new sound cuts through the layered clamor of voices and weapons.

"Fuck, those are fucking Genotech patrols!" AJ yells through the noise, over the metallic whine of the electric guns.

Nick can even smell them now; there's a special ozone reek to those guns. Genotech patrols are licensed to kill, and Genotech weapons are distinctly harder to battle with nightsticks than, say, other nightsticks. AJ's already scrambling to his feet and waving at Nick.

He's not sure who makes the decision, but he has a creeping suspicion that it's he, that he suddenly veers to the left and down the stairs instead of continuing ahead to the relative safety of the cellblock. It can't really have been AJ, even though AJ seems to have things invested in this riot, in the cause for this riot. It must have been me, he thinks, even though he can't remember actively deciding, but here he is, anyway, running down the stairs, and AJ's right on his heels. The ozone stench seems to follow them down, as if they've already been fried by Genotech bullets. As if it's their own smell now.

The closet door gapes wide open like the slack jaws of some disappointed beast. Nick skids to a stop and wonders why he has to steel himself to look in. There have been so many corpses already. The whole place is drenched in blood by now, or it seems to be. Almost as if the blood smell is a counterpoint to every other smell; the metallic-meaty baseline for everything else in here.

It's empty. He turns to AJ. His head hurts a little from the smoke and the heavy air, the reek of the Genotech guns.

AJ pats him on the shoulder and looks past him into the closet. There's a brief pause in the shooting and screaming and banging: a sixty microsecond vigil, Nick thinks, and then it starts up again, louder even, if that's possible, and AJ's rooting around in the piles of mops and rags at the back of the closet, and then he's pulling Justin from his hiding place.

"Fuck me," Nick says out loud, but he can't even hear it himself. It sounds like the whole building is coming down, as if they're bringing in tanks.

Justin shakes his head mutely and the dingy-grey mop he was wearing in the fashion of a wig falls off his head. It occurs to Nick that of all places in this fucking prison, this is the dumbest, least safe spot for him to be.

AJ is yelling something at him, angry face, and he notices that Justin is struggling like a fish on a hook in AJ's grip. He struggles in Nick's grip, too, when Nick puts his hands on him, but only for a little while. Then he looks up into Nick's face with eyes that show too much white, but he's trusting, trusting. Nick keeps his hands - still soiled with Mr 698F-909-G21's drying blood - on Justin's shoulders, pats a little, like he'd pat his dog back when he had a dog.

That dog would have had a heart attack on the spot in here, because there was no creature more afraid of loud noises than old Trotsky. Justin shivers a little under his hands, too, like Trot used to when the going got rough.

"They'll find us!" AJ hollers. "We gotta head down!"

Nick gives him a two thumbs up, even though he has no idea how to 'head down' from here. AJ's never seen fit to share his big secret, and Nick hasn't been particularly curious. AJ's got a mouth the size of all of Cellblock 3.

It seems to be designed by an idiot savant on bad 'shrooms, but the trapdoor/slide contraption under the laundromat works. Justin's tight-faced and determined and slides down without hesitating a beat, even though it's a four foot fall at least at the end, and Nick hears his muffled cry before he lets himself go.

The sounds of the oncoming tide of patrols and rioteers are muted by the trapdoor, and Nick actually hears Justin mutter curses under his breath.

"Can you walk?" he asks and pokes Justin in the shoulder, "hey, can you walk?"

"I think it's. I broke it again," Justin gasps, "fucking HELL."

That's a no, then, so Nick lets him lean on him, throws his arm around his shoulder and supports his lean frame, strangely heavy now that he's hopping pathetically on one leg.

He hears it first, he thinks, but he feels Justin jerk and knows it's loud enough for all of them.

"Fuck," AJ says next to him. "You hear that? Fuckin' dogs."

Nick spots the hole in the tunnel wall seconds before AJ pushes them down the dark, half-hidden subsidiary.

He blinks to adjust to the darkness and when he can see, he's looking down the barrel of a gun. The dogs suddenly seem very far away.


	17. River

JC doesn't have to see Chris fire his gun again and again without changing expression to know that he'll be useless here. Chris could take on an army on his own, it seems. As if it's all destined; that Chris must fulfil some untold prophecy by killing his way to Justin. It'll work out, too, JC thinks. He'll see Justin's face again, see it light up with recognition and joy. One of these men will be Justin, and Chris will know and let his gun arm drop.

JC can hardly lift his gun. His legs ache from walking and tension. He's afraid. Always afraid. D keeps shooting him worried glances, and he knows they'd be better off without him.

The floor of the tunnels here is rough gravel, and it's impossible to walk silently on it. He feels clumsy.

*

When they've left the fourth or fifth dead body behind in the tunnel, JC decides to pretend this is just a dream. Until they find Justin, it's not real. Today never happened, he thinks, it doesn't scare me at all. Today never happened.

Since today never happened, something else did. Lance told him about his country house once. A big house down by the river, and not the river as it is when it crosses the sewer system, filthy and ill-used, but the river as it is up in the country, clean and full of fish.

He can think about Lance without wanting to put the gun to his head. It surprises him, but he figures he's simply starting to get used to disappointment. Chris always rags him about that. "How can you be so fucking surprised every time you get fucked over, man?" he said, even back in the camp, after Noop left, after Joey escaped, after Gi died. "How can you act like you didn't see it coming?"

He never sees them coming, he never used to. He doesn't want to. It would be like knowing his own death. He wouldn't be able to think about anything else.

He thinks about Lance's river, Lance's clean river, and the rose garden. He's never seen a rose garden. Lance knows all the names of all the roses. He told JC about them in his calm, deep voice, and JC listened, resting his head on Lance's chest. The clean river and the rose garden and the big, old house. Wedding china that Lance's grandmother's grandfather gave his eldest son. Old, loved things.

"Keep your eyes open, dude," Chris whispers, and he blinks and realises he's been wandering around deep in his thoughts, and they're coming to a crossroads; there are voices ahead, voices and light.

"I'm sorry," he says, but it's starting to sound so routine, like it's lost its meaning through overuse. He's so sorry about so many things, he supposes, that there isn't enough sorry to go around. Sorry I can't be more sorry, he thinks and bites his lip to stop himself from giggling hysterically. Chris turns away, and he and D share glances and nods; some sort of code language that JC doesn't understand.

That's also hard to explain; how he's been living with Chris for so long and never learned from him. Chris works so easily with this stranger; it's like they speak the same language and JC is the exchange student who hasn't learned yet and never will.

He forces himself to relax, to hold the gun in a grip that doesn't shake from the strain. His hands are starting to ache. He has fired guns before. Chris taught him as soon as they were out and could get their hands on guns. He's a pretty good shot, even. He's always had good hand to eye coordination, and when he's calm and rested he can hit a tin can at a hundred and twenty paces. Right now he thinks he might be able to hit his own foot, but that's it.

They wait, back against the wall, and someone stumbles in from the main tunnel, two men, and light falls on their faces.

Justin's face doesn't light up with the joy of recognition. Instead, he looks sick and pale and tired, and his hair is gone and his face is angular and unfamiliar. Worn. And he's leaning on a tall, broad-shouldered man who's got an arm protectively around Justin's shoulder, and Chris is pointing his gun at them.

"Chris," Justin says, so softly it's almost nothing more than an exhalation of inheld breath.

"Chris," JC says and puts his hand on Chris' gun. Justin's friend looks at him with cold eyes, like he doesn't care if Chris pulls the trigger or not; if JC wants to stop Chris or urge him on.

"Chris," Justin says again. "Chris." He's pulling away from his friend, towards Chris, and now JC sees the light in his eyes. There's no choir of angels singing Alleluia, but Justin takes a clumsy step and falls into Chris' arms, and that's the happy ending JC has waited for.

It's gonna be okay, he thinks.

He turns away to give them privacy and steps around everyone, into the bright light of the main tunnel. It reminds him, déjà-vu, almost, of the last morning in the camp. He woke up early and stepped from the darkness in the barrack out into the heat and light of the morning sun. Chris waited outside, leaning against the wall. JC turns his head to the side, slowly because he's still sure this is his memory playing with him, and sees AJ McLean leaning against the wall, thinner, older and harder than he was five years ago, but still with the same sardonic twist to the mouth.

Behind JC, someone says, "Holy shit," softly and reverently, but he doesn't know who it is. There's a chill running down his spine. He hears dogs barking somewhere, but he can't tell if it's just in his head now; the memory is strong and almost more real than this tunnel. The guards released dogs, and Chris killed two of them with a stump of wood, just beat them to death. "I hate killing animals," he said, but he killed them anyway, because the guards were on the way. JC still doesn't know just how Chris did it, how he got the upper hand against them. They were sleek, deadly animals; not at all like the stray puppies JC once saw die in a dusty yard, under the heels of bored children. That was earlier, though, not part of this memory, but it was another sunny day, hot and windless, and he walked up to them when they first brought the puppies into the yard, because he'd always wanted a dog. He was ten years old, he thinks, maybe eleven. He threw up in a bush and ran back to his barrack, and when he told Noop, Noop went and found those kids and beat the shit out of them, but the puppies were dead, and JC doesn't know who finally took away the small cadavers, but they were there for a while, all day at least, and he couldn't stop looking out the window at them. He still has nightmares about them. Funny how things stick with you.

AJ has the same expression as Chris had when he turned to JC, squinted in the sun and said; "I'm going now. You ready?"

JC thinks he's been staring at him for too long.

"Hey," AJ says. The barking of the dogs seems to be growing louder. "Can you use that thing?"

JC blinks at him and tries to follow. In his head, Chris says, again, "I'm going now. You ready?"

It's really loud now. His ears hurt. Someone's yelling, he thinks it's Chris again. "Come ON!"

AJ ducks into the dark tunnel.

The first thing they had to do, once the killing guard dogs and cutting fences and crawling through holes bit was over, was to cross a river. JC doesn't remember the name of the river anymore, maybe he never knew, and it might have been the same river as the one Lance talks about, but he's not sure. They crossed it at night. JC wasn't very good at swimming, but it was the only way they could go, and when he was on the other side, dripping and shivering, and Chris was telling him to hurry the fuck up, hurry up, he felt a little like he'd accomplished something, and a lot like he was reborn.

_"I'm going now. You ready?" _

"JC! Move!"

The light in the tunnel here is bright like sunlight, and it feels like there's a breeze here, too. His hair tickles his forehead. A draft, at least.

"I'm ready," JC says.


	18. Scar

The worst thing is that you're too tired to be happy. The pain in your foot is clawing its way up your leg and your vision is starting to blur around the edges, curling up like an old photograph. But you bury your face in Chris' neck and close your eyes and there's a moment, you think, when you can't feel any of it.

You do feel his hands on your back; he's clutching you tight enough to make it hard to breathe, and he's whispering things you can't hear, but you feel his breath on your ear.

"Chris," you mumble. You're not sure you can come up with anything else.

"Kid," he says, "Justin," and you hear that.

Behind you, Nick exhales loudly and says, "Holy shit."

You look up and see someone standing behind Chris; you can't remember his name, but you've seen him around. One of Alex's boys. He's smiling, just the barest curling of his lips, but he looks like he's holding back.

Then you hear the dogs again and jerk upright. Your bad foot touches the ground and the pain roars again, and you clutch Chris' shoulders desperately. Out in the tunnel where you came from, AJ says something, and then Chris says, loudly, "Come ON!" and AJ shows up, and everyone's moving. Chris hands you a gun and puts his hand around your waist. "JC! Move!" he yells, and you wait, and you hear the dogs come closer, but it's not as bad as the last time because Chris' arm is tight around you and the gun is heavy and reassuring in your hand.

There's still no JC, and Chris swears and starts to turn. It's a little hard to negotiate, because you're lightheaded and every time you move, your head spins and your stomach clenches, but the barking is really loud now, and there's just no time, and Chris screams for JC and you see AJ and whatsisface from the sewers run back towards the circle of light, and then you just hear the sharp whine of the guns.

Chris spins you around suddenly, roughly, and pushes you against the wall with hard hands, props you up like a puppet and leaves, runs towards the screams and the barking dogs and the bullets flying, and he's yelling something, but you can't hear it because you put weight on your foot again and you felt the broken ends of the bones grind together, and you may have whimpered his name, but you don't remember it.

*

You come to and the stench of ozone is so heavy that you can't breathe, so you lie on the dirty tunnel floor and gasp for breath. Someone's screaming somewhere nearby, just around the corner, you think, out in the big tunnel, in rage or sorrow or agony or all of the above, but it sounds more like a wounded animal bellowing, with the echo and the sound of bullets fired from regular guns.

You realise that there is no more whine of electric guns and no more barking, and it's just one man screaming. You force yourself to open your eyes. The guns fall silent, and a second later, the scream cuts off harshly. You know it was Chris, but you don't understand why.

Then someone else says, "There'll be more. There's gonna be a lot more, so just STOP--" and Chris says, in a voice that's hoarse from screaming,

"I'll fucking stop when I want to--"

and you sit up quickly, too quickly because your head spins madly again, and say with as much force as you can muster, "Chris?"

You almost pass out again, and amazingly, fucking insanely, you think about the pills and you want one fiercely, need it like nothing else. For just a second, because then Chris is back, crouching over you and pulling you into his arms, hugging you too hard, because now you really can't breathe, but he's made of concrete or something, because you can't struggle loose until AJ says,

"Jesus fucking Christ, you asshole, we gotta move, move, MOVE!"

*

You don't even notice at first. You have a real problem keeping your thoughts focused on anything at all, except moving and the pain in your foot and Chris, but later, you think you must be the most self-centered moron in the world, because it takes you at least half an hour to figure out that JC isn't there anymore.

By then, you're too exhausted to say anything, so you just hobble on and try not to think about it.

*

You hear Chris say, "We can't go back there, can we?" and the guy, whose name you think is something short, like just initials, only the initials were JC, right, and AJ; how many guys do you know who don't have real names, anyway? - says, "They'll be scouring the whole system by now. Alex must have evacuated already."

"What about--" Chris says, and the guy says,

"They'll take the folks on the upper levels, too. They'll be safe."

You can't figure out what they're talking about, so you just lean your head on Chris' shoulder and try to think about the floor underneath your feet and how you'd like it to stay there and not come any closer to your face.

"Hold on a little longer, okay?" Chris whispers.

"Okay," you say into his shirt, and only now do you realise that he's not just the usual dirty, but actually reeking of blood and that eternal ozone. You blink and raise your head and squint into the gloom. "What happened?" you ask, even though you're not sure you want to know.

He doesn't answer you, but you feel him tense against you, coil right up like a steel spring. And you guess that's answer enough for right now.

*

You don't even notice when you pass out, just become aware again and you're on your back on the ground, your head propped on Chris' sturdy thigh. His hand is stroking your head, but it's more like a nervous tic than a caress. You twist your head to the side and see Nick and the guy from Alex' troupe sitting side by side with their backs against the opposite wall. Nick has leaned his head against the guy's shoulder, and you're pretty sure he's asleep. AJ is smoking, and you wonder when you got to a level where the gas leaks aren't an issue.

*

You wake up later, how much later, you're not sure, but they've turned off the flashlights and it's pitch black. Chris is curled up against you, pressed into your back like he would prefer to be on the inside, and he's shaking and you're pretty sure he's crying. You didn't know Chris could cry, and you can't remember why he would be crying, even though you have a feeling you should.

You want to turn over and put your arms around him, but you're not sure it would be welcome, so you just lie there and feel his tears seep through your shirt.

*

The next time you awake, it's to searing, blinding pain and hands holding you down.

"Shh, shh," Chris says, his voice raw with concern, "just bear it, D's setting the bone," and you see AJ and Nick hanging on to your legs with all their might and Alex' guy - D, of course - pulling at your foot and it fucking hurts, and you think you're screaming even though you try not to.

*

It's easier to walk with the splint, at least, or easier to hobble. "We're gonna go up now," Chris says. His voice is still a little rough, but he doesn't sound like he's got a throatful of nails anymore.

"Up where?" you ask, and the corner of his mouth twitches a little when he says,

"Up there." You look up, and there's the distinctive ring of a manhole right above you.

Everyone else seems to be busy with something else, so you lean in and kiss him, just quickly, but he grabs you and pulls you back.

"Goddamnit," he says when he lets you go again. "Goddamnit," and it sounds like his voice is breaking a little.

*

They have to help you climb up, but when you're up and Chris is up, D just nods at you and turns back, AJ flicks his cigarette on the ground and grinds it out with the heel of his boot and follows him.

Nick frowns at you as if he's not sure just what to say. You're pretty sure you have no idea what to say.

"Stay alive," he finally mutters and disappears down the hole.

"What--" you say, but Chris interrupts you.

"D's gonna get Joey and Baby," he says. Oh, right. You still don't know what happened, really. To anyone. You don't think this is the right time to ask. Instead you grope for Chris' hand and squeeze it and look around.

It's night, but the sky is showing the faintest promise of colour along the horizon. You're standing in the empty yard of some great abandoned factory, and beyond the crumbling machinery and the enormous, precariously leaning buildings, you see a jagged treeline silhouetted in deeper black against blue-black sky.

"No more sewers," Chris says.

"Where will we live?" you ask.

"I don't know," he says, and that's all either of you say in a while.


	19. Abyss

The call comes in the middle of dinner, and Father's face is stern when he returns to make excuses.

"You didn't finish your roast," Mother says gently.

"It's a riot, darling," Father says, and Lance drops his fork on his wineglass. The paper-thin crystal shatters with a musical cling. He tries to pick up the pieces and cuts himself. The maid shushes him away and clucks in distress over the stains on the pristine linen tablecloth.

"Blood and wine not come out," she mutters under her breath, softly enough that Mother doesn't hear.

"I wish you'd let us keep at least some of my father's heritage," Mother says, but she's smiling indulgently. "Let me look at that."

She holds onto his hand and Father leaves. Lance's mouth is dry, and he wishes he hadn't spilled his wine all over the table.

*

Father returns three hours later. "They're still at it," he says when Lance asks. "I'll go back. Genotech are tamping it down."

"What was it about?" Lance asks.

"A war between gangs, it seems, but they're killing guards and pretty much anyone who gets in the way."

"I'd like to go along," Lance says quickly, before he loses his nerve. Father raises an eyebrow.

"I don't--"

"I have been thinking about writing my thesis on jurisdictional strife between the police force and Genotech patrols," he fudges. He doesn't have to cross his fingers behind his back; he has thought about it. At least once.

"Really?" Father says, taking his coat. "That's a fascinating subject. Very well. But it will be grisly."

"I know," Lance says.

He keeps his hands folded in his lap the whole way, to hide the trembling. When they get closer and he can hear the sirens and see the smoke rising towards the evening sky, he pinches the soft flesh in the fold between his thumb and index finger, hard.

*

'Grisly' doesn't cover it. Even father looks a little sallow and pinched when they start hauling out the bodies.

"They'll bury them in a mass grave," he tells Lance. "At least two hundred inmates are dead, most of them nameless non-citizens."

"What was Genotech doing here?" Lance asks when a patrol of stone-faced soldiers in Genotech's black and green uniforms march by.

Father doesn't look up from the file he's flipping through. "They're looking for an inmate, a specific one. Seems they lost one of their prototypes a while ago, and he turned up here." He closes the file smartly. "Have you done much on identification of bodies yet?"

"Some," Lance says. "Did they find their prototype?"

"Doesn't look like it. He might be dead, of course. Since Genotech have an interest in this, they'll have a presence during the investigation, especially in the identification process. It'll make things move a little slower than usual."

It's a perfectly lovely evening. The prison yard has a hedge of pink-white tea roses, probably Hume's Blush. If the air wasn't filled with noxious smoke, he could identify it by the scent. The firemen and police officers who are sharing the gruesome task of cleaning up after the massacre are lining up the corpses along the hedge. Lance follows his father down the row, and he promises himself not to look, and looks anyway.

*

After a while, they all start looking the same; every bloody face turned serene in death, with their unfocused eyes and half-open mouths and cheeks drained of colour. So Lance almost walks right past him.

He does, in fact. Walks right past, but then something catches his attention, maybe just the familiar angle of a cheekbone glimpsed in the corner of his eye. Maybe God himself poked him in the side and said, "Look."

He looks.

*

His father doesn't make trouble when he wants to leave. "It's painful," he just says, and Lance nods soundlessly, because he can't say more than two words without his voice breaking, and even that is like cutting his own throat from the inside. "You take the car, son," Father adds, "I'll catch a ride." And he pats Lance on the shoulder, gently and sympathetically. "God forbid you should ever get used to this."

He wanted to scream when he saw JC. He kept it inside, kept it tamped down with all his strength, through asking his father about the car; even as he negotiates the teeming masses of grim-faced professionals, he keeps it down. When he is far enough from the prison that the pillar of black smoke is the only thing he can see of it, and he's pulled over to the side of the road, he finds that the scream has withered and died, and all he can produce is a faint wheezing.

Standing frozen by the row of bodies, he stared and stared, because he knew that this was the last look, and he stared even when firemen carrying more bodies jostled him to the side, and he stared when his father tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he was all right. He stared when he nodded.

He wanted to close JC's eyes. There was something obscene about dead eyes; the way they gave the face new expressions, accusing ones Lance had never seen on JC in life.

He broke a rose off the hedge when he left, but he didn't dare lay it on JC. It's on the seat next to him now, and he regrets it, regrets chickening out. Everyone was busy; no one would have paid attention to some fresh-faced law student poking around the bodies. The rose would have fallen off JC's body anyway when they moved him, been trampled underfoot and forgotten.

*

When he comes home, his mother hugs him. "You look like death warmed over, sweetie," she says and gives him some brandy. "It must have been horrid."

"Yes," he says. His mouth is numb, but he doesn't think he slurs the word as much as he thought he might.

"You didn't know any of the guards, did you? They said on the radio that several were killed."

"No," he says. "I didn't know anyone."


End file.
